Gateway to Better Hiring

The ease of applying for jobs online means more competition for applicants and more work for recruiters. A "logical gate" would up the ante

by Liz Ryan

Technology is a great boon, except when it's not. Every working person has had at least one experience where technology let him down in a big way—whether it's the inexplicably dead cell phone during a crucial call, or the "blue screen of death" in the middle of a presentation. I'm not advocating for a return to carbon paper and Wite-Out, but it's fair to say that at times our dependence on technology can create as many problems as it solves.

Take the job-search arena. In the old days, it took a little time and energy to apply for a position. You had to write a letter, get an envelope, and find a stamp. That small expenditure of effort might not have taxed any of us too much, but compare it to the typical present process of applying for a job online. If you've already got your résumé written, you often only need to fill in a few personal-contact information fields, upload your résumé, and hit submit. What could be simpler?

As the effort involved in pursuing a job opportunity decreases, the burden on everyone in the process increases. Human resources people and recruiters have far more résumés to wade through since the onset of online job searching than they did before. And extremely well-qualified candidates can find themselves in a pool with marginally—at best—qualified ones, as well as ones that may have just applied on a lark. Technology has made the process easier on the front end, and more difficult on the back end.

All-Purpose Résumés

When quality and volume-of-responses problems began to emerge a few years ago, many employers moved to keyword-based résumé screening as an antidote; and you won't be surprised to learn that canny job-seekers found ways to add suitable keywords (relevant to their backgrounds or not) to their résumés to outfox the filters.

We have all tacitly agreed to the résumé-plus-cover letter standard for our basic job application. The problem with this is that the résumé has usually been written long before the candidate has applied for the particular job opening. So the résumé is a boilerplate document that does not answer the question: Will this candidate succeed in this company? What if employers shifted the game by asking for something different—something that would make it much easier for them to separate the hirable wheat from the no-thank-you chaff?

As recruiters complain about being deluged with résumés, and job-seekers complain about getting lost among hordes of other job-seekers, I'd like to offer a suggestion. Let's add another step to the application process—something a technical person would call a logical gate. A gate is a go/no-go point in a process. Here, a logical gate can help a hiring manager quickly divide the incoming applicant flow into "yes" and "no" piles—much more quickly, in fact, than reviewing résumés can.

Be an Applicant Gatekeeper

The gate is a simple request that asks a candidate to do something he or she may not be accustomed to doing. If the gate is well chosen, it will show which candidates are most suitable for an interview. A good gate will help the job-seeker, too—rather than having his résumé lost among hundreds of others, he'll have a chance to show his qualifications right off the bat, and differentiate himself from less able or less motivated candidates.

Here is an example. I was hiring an editor, and so I included this instruction in the job ad: "If you are interested in this job, please write to me at this e-mail address with your comments on the most recent edition of our newsletter." (I included the URL for the newsletter, of course.) That is a simple enough gate. Curious to know what percentage of candidates followed the instruction? Ten percent. The rest probably never saw the instruction at all, "buried" as it was in a 100-word job posting. They just spotted the job ad, read maybe the first line, and shot off a résumée. That's fine.